After Pichai, the DOJ successfully exposed Google’s expert technical witness Edward Fox, a Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, as not independent or credible Fox conducted an experiment and study which led him to believe that a majority of the Google-Microsoft quality gap must be explained by “factors other than user interaction data”. It became clear through the DOJ’s cross-examination of Fox that Google had an inordinate amount of influence and control over the study, calling into question its independence.

The DOJ asked Fox whether Google’s counsel told him to use fewer footnotes than he usually would, asking whether his “original report could have had another hundred footnotes.” Fox replied, “Sure.” 

From our friends at TWIGA: 

The DOJ showed that Google had discretion over critical aspects of the study, and  that for some of those aspects, Fox did not know the specific details of them until months after the study. In one exchange regarding how many human raters Google used, Fox admitted that he did not know the exact number until a conversation with a Google engineer four or five months after the experiment had completed and his report was finished, saying, “I wanted to find out the specifics,” after the fact of the experiment. Fox also admitted that he did not even have a list of Google engineers who worked on the experiment. The DOJ also asked Fox if he had reviewed the code Google used in the experiment; Fox testified he did not review code in this case.

Google then called Dr. Ben Gomes, Google’s current Senior Vice President of Education. Gomes previously worked in Google Search from 1999 to 2020, serving as the head of the Search team from 2016 to 2020. Similar to Pichai, Google’s lawyer gave Gomes an opportunity to paint a vivid picture of the good old days of Google. Gomes excitedly spoke about the “very open and very free” culture and innovations at early Google. But monopolies rarely begin as monopolies. And first mover innovation does not create a right for Google, once it had formed its monopoly, to engage in anticompetitive conduct.

The DOJ had the last word with Gomes, who seemed to see, from the inside, that Google Search was prioritizing revenue over users. Gomes agreed with the DOJ assertion that “having more queries helps with ranking search results.” The DOJ asked Gomes if, at any time during his 20 years working on Google Search, he had ever studied “diminishing returns” of user data. He testified that he had not and did not “know the details of when diminishing returns set in,” which undermines Google’s implied assertion that other search competitors have “enough” data to compete.

The week closed with Google’s expert witness Mark Israel, still on stand after two days. The DOJ destroyed expert Mark Israel’s credibility at the get-go and turned him into a defacto gov witness. The DOJ read out a previous judge’s verdict calling out Israel’s credibility and that is opinions were “entitled to no weight.”